Hundreds Protest Screening of Pro-Pinochet Film in Chile

The Chilean riot police used water cannons to disperse protestors outside a theater in the capital, Santiago, screening the documentary "Pinochet," a sympathetic look at the dictator's rule.Credit
Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SANTIAGO, Chile — Hundreds of people protested Sunday near a theater where supporters of the former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet attended the screening of a pro-Pinochet documentary, reflecting the divisions that still exist in Chile almost 40 years after he seized power in a bloody coup.

The police on Sunday sealed off the area around the Caupolicán Theater, where political rallies against General Pinochet were held during the years of his dictatorship. The demonstrators tried to block people from entering the theater, throwing eggs, spitting on them, and shouting “assassins” and “fascists.”

Outside the theater, Pinochet loyalists held banners and small sculptures of the former dictator and chanted derisive slogans about the more than 1,000 people reported to have disappeared during his rule.

The police used tear gas and chemical-laced water cannons to break up the protest. Small groups of demonstrators set up barricades and threw rocks at the police. At least 64 were reported to have been arrested and 20 police officers and 2 people injured.

“We owe our lives to Pinochet — he was a good president,” said Carmencita, an older woman holding a cardboard sign. She refused to give her last name for fear of trouble with her neighbors. Referring to Salvador Allende, the Socialist president who was overthrown in the 1973 coup, she said: “During the Allende government, I couldn’t even get a pound of sugar. Pinochet put this country in order with a good economy, and that persists today.”

The documentary film, titled “Pinochet,” focuses on the reasons the military gave for seizing power, and the changes in economic policy the junta introduced. The screening was sponsored by an organization of retired military officers and the September 11 Corporation, a group named for the date of the coup. It reportedly invited right-wing political figures from the United States, Spain, France and Argentina to the screening, and two pro-Franco figures from Spain attended and spoke at the event.

The protesters decried the film as revisionist history. “This is a homage to a murderer and a thief, responsible for deaths, torture and exile,” said Bárbara Riquelme, who said her father, Samuel Riquelme, a former chief detective, was arrested and severely tortured after the coup. “This government should have denied permission for this homage, but it didn’t, because it also has blood on its hands.”

Human rights organizations and leftist politicians had called on the government to ban the screening, but the right-wing administration of President Sebastián Piñera said it had to respect the organizers’ rights of free assembly and expression. The human rights groups turned to the courts, suing to block the screening on the ground that the film was an apology for violence, but the Court of Appeals ruled on Friday to allow the event.

Even so, a government spokesman, Andrés Chadwick of the right-wing U.D.I. party, expressed remorse that the party he had helped found had backed General Pinochet. “I feel deep regret for having been part of a government that brutally violated human rights,” Mr. Chadwick said.

General Pinochet handed over power to an elected successor in 1990. Since then, nearly 80 members of his military and police forces, including the leaders of his secret intelligence agency, have been convicted of human rights crimes, and an additional 350 cases are in the courts now, involving about 700 military and civilian defendants, according to a survey that the Diego Portales University Human Rights Clinic released on Saturday. General Pinochet was being investigated for corruption and human rights violations when he died in December 2006.

Official human rights reports have established that more than 3,000 people were killed or made to disappear during the Pinochet years, and that nearly 40,000 more were tortured. Pinochet supporters dispute those figures and point to the cases of a few families who fraudulently claimed government compensation for relatives listed as “disappeared” who were still alive or whose deaths were unrelated.

A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2012, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Hundreds Protest Screening of Pro-Pinochet Film in Chile. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe